O of utterance o of address and the interjection oh, I think I could write an essay on oh, lyric utterance as a refinement of the grunt or the shriek or the cry. They flower richly as conventional wisdom converts sadness to lyric, fish-lip against the glass. Look in his sun-straining face, his coughed-up lung. Footfirst the beings burst. A lamb explains lambness, music surrounds us. Quieten. Shouldn’t I be tilting at telecommunications giants, their immaterial chords voice such energy. Oh O.

This isn’t the glow-up moth expected. Phototactic urges call her during the night, street lamps and porch lights charming her in the dark. Since emerging from anticipatory layers, maturity has only gifted her routine monotony, no climactic crest as promised by her elders. Negative introspection distorts her self-image. Moth still compares antennae at a distance. Measures her thorax in each puddle’s reflection. Oh, to become a precious, delicate thing — not a hairy klutz stepping into adulthood with hesitance. If only she hadn’t taken pupation for granted, with its orthodontics straightening mandibles to precision, transforming pimpled disproportions in secret. Dreaming of elegant wings like those of her monarch and swallowtail peers, moth hid her insecurities well — but what a lonesome eternity puberty seemed. Those silk-swaddled days made her miss the larval stage, blessed by juvenile innocence, when there’d been no fear of standing out among grubby chunky-faced peers. As a caterpillar, moth could eat and eat lush greenery without guilt pinning her to the leaves. She’d dreamed, still dreams, of someday growing up to be like the best of her own kind.  Strong and stout, peculiar feathered perfection —  radiant-spirited, an inner source of warmth drawing others in.

It’s like an elephant, Wilfred thinks. So old, this tree, that its trunk bulges; ridden with furrows and knots.

It bristles with errant twigs and balls of mistletoe. He’ll never find Papa’s stick amongst them. 

He threw it too hard, watched it disappear amongst low branches. A broad staircase of overlapping discs climbs this side of the trunk, supple and flesh-toned, indicating a way up.

He begins to climb.

It’s only a stick. There are hundreds of others littering the forest floor. But this one is Papa’s, a sworn enemy who tans his hide. In Wilfred’s hand it is transformed, to shoot the Luftwaffe bombers from the sky, conjure a spirit and change base metal to gold. He has lent it power.

So up he goes, hand over hand, bare knees anointing the bark with fresh blood.

A flash of movement in the corner of one eye — his brain grapples to catch up. Birds scatter like seeds as an echoing call punctures the silence.

‘Wilfy?’

One frozen moment passes, as soundwaves disperse like spores. Then his limbs spring into action, pistoling him higher.

‘Wilf.’ Louder now, closer.

One grubby hand rests on a knot, spiralled and rutted with age. Just above, a hole opens into darkness.

He climbs in.

Wilfred’s eyes close, open, close again. No difference between the two. What is he standing on? Something broke his fall, and it was a fall — much further than he’d expected. The whole trunk must be hollow, rotten through. One experimental hand reaches out, connects with damp softness, recoils. He can hear his breath like the bellows Mum uses on the fire.

Mum — is she still out there? She’ll kill him for sure.

He listens, but rough walls grow up around his body, layered with teeming life. Their rustlings fill the space.

He blinks and looks around. Eyes now adjusted, the black shifts into grey, weaving ghostlike shadows across his vision. One hand rises to tap the bridge of his nose—a comforting gesture, miming the application of joke-shop specs, and he accompanies his swivelling gaze with robotic sounds. Now he can see in the dark like the Green Lantern; a vague, chartreuse light close by his feet willed into being.

*

Time is short. Marion crosses her arms over her body as she marches through the forest, snapping twigs with each step. Blessed boy, why can he not see? She does these things for his own good, against her instincts. ‘Spare the rod…’ isn’t that the saying? She has a duty to prepare her son for the harshness of adulthood. God knows she was unprepared for it herself, and look how that turned out. So now she does bad things for his own good, against her instincts. She’ll find him fast, slap him hard, drag him home by the ear in view of his Pa to spare him a belting. That last one almost killed her: she can still see the buckle-scar like a brand on his baby skin, and it must not repeat. People will notice — only yesterday, Mrs Gordon frowned and offered her spare room, as if she and Wilfred were in need of charity.     

But if she bears the role of enforcer herself, then she won’t be as helpless when the inevitable comes. She mutters this litany of intention beneath her breath, clenching fingernails into palms. He will not run wild, even if she must close her eyes as she metes out the punishment. Her Mary Janes bloom with a patina of mud at each heavy step, sending messages through the strata of leaf litter to the mesh of living wires beneath. Wordless alerts pulse from her oblivious pores and the woodland braces, detecting the minutest of signals — scent, sound, heartbeat. The forest is a natural metropolis, filled with enemies waiting to strike. 

*

It’s not fair; injustice weighs heavy on Wilfred’s stomach, like his muddy leather soccer ball, rolling around in there amongst all the half-digested sweets. The image is too much — he leans forward in the near-dark and retches. Now he sees the dim light source more clearly, directly beneath. Something growing in the base of the tree trunk. Can he reach it with a toe? Perhaps he might stretch out…

‘Wilfy?’ Startled at the closeness of his mother’s voice, his play-worn soles skid on the sheer bark walls. He is falling, skinning his palms, and his forehead connects with something sharp. She floats through to him vaguely as he lies there, but quieter now as if from the end of a long tunnel.

The glowing objects are now right beside him, and through an encroaching fog, his brain rejoices in recognition. As Wilfred touches the fungus, vibrations pass from his fingertips to their pale flesh, down through the depths of the tree’s roots and outwards to its neighbours.

This must all be a dream, his tired mind thinks, to keep him safe in the dark. He smiles in relief and closes his eyes. Under the tree, far beneath, life stirs.             

*

Marion’s legs buckle and she sinks to the ground, propped against the bulbous tree. Her hand rests on a damp cushion of moss, finding its texture oddly comforting against her skin. Wilfred’s threatened to run before, and after all, it may be for the best. What kind of mother can’t protect her own son?

Lethargy creeps into her bones, and her eyelids sweep the day aside. Her own Pa’s ready fists loom from some unwary part of her mind, always poised for attack. Synapses fire, activating nerves, dilating pupils and opening pores. Her fingertips tremble against the moss, and its minutely clustered leaves taste salt and minerals from her skin, triggering their own message, passed still deeper into the soil.


Marion is nine years old in her dream. She has run to Auntie’s bedroom at the back of the bungalow, where her father never goes. She crouches in one corner, facing the wrecked bed. A universe of dots blooms from the corner opposite, right above Auntie’s head, scattered on its edges but drawing in to depthless black at the centre. Marion is afraid to look into that darkness. The air is pungent and she wonders if the black dots have caused Auntie’s sickness, creeping in to colonise her lungs with each desperate gasp. An immense clanking machine stands by the bed, tethering the woman with tubes like an animal. A mask grips her face. Marion can see her mouth through its transparency, perpetually frozen in a silent scream.

Marion is not afraid — Auntie’s love has fed her through Pa’s famine, and still the woman uses her last precious bursts of energy to sustain her niece with tales of valour — Artemisia of Caria, Boudicca, and most of all Saint Joan, ‘little more than a child herself, Marion, remember that!’

The doctor feeds her medicines and tales of his own. These potions once grew in kitchen-like laboratories, he says. It all comes from nature, he says. Marion eyes the black corner warily as the man speaks.      

A sound breaks into the dream without waking her — a familiar child’s laugh. Auntie’s bedroom dissipates and for a moment Marion is standing behind the garden’s air raid shelter, a wartime relic where blossoms emerge like miracles from a bed of weeds.    

Marion stirs with a last waking image in her mind: a kindly neighbour wrapping a home-made bandage to her leg. Old bread mottled blue and green like cheese, a family remedy passed as a gift.

Her eyelids flutter open, aware of her son’s heartbeat before she hears his voice.

*

Two bodies, one inside the tree and one outside, suspended in golden light like flies in amber. Spores hang in a shaft of golden sunlight — the light itself sentient. The bodies are held outside time, but the spell may be broken in an instant. One errant cloud may lower the forest roof to shift this wild room to a grey-scale lino print.

The boy’s voice breaks through.
 
‘Mum?’
 
He didn’t mean to shout it, compelled by her breathing presence close by. A bone-white hand materialises above his head, bleached by sunlight. If he can just reach out and clasp it, perhaps?
 
They tumble together to the ground, grazed and bleeding but poulticed in mud. The moss-bed breaks their fall.
 
‘Will we go home?
 
She tousles her son’s hair.
 
‘Perhaps. Or we could go visiting for a few days. That nice Mrs Gordon from the market…’
 
‘But Mum,’ he breaks in, springing to his feet. ‘Papa’s stick — the tree took it.’
 
‘A stick’s a stick, there are hundreds of them, all the same — look around you!’
 
He burns with frustration at the uselessness of words. How to explain?
 
‘That one killed monsters,’ he tries, in a small voice.
 
She smiles, stoops to the ground, and plucks a wand from the forest floor.
 
‘That was your Pa’s stick, not yours. The tree wanted it back. But this one…’
 
She touches it to her son’s left shoulder, then to his right, finally placing it across the boy’s upturned palm.
 
‘…can be anything you please.’